Pages
Pages 3, part of iWork '08
Developer:	Apple Inc.
Latest release:	3.0.1 / September 27, 2007
OS:	Mac OS X
Genre:	Word processor / Page layout
License:	Proprietary
Website:	Pages

Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple Inc. and a part of the iWork productivity suite (which also includes Keynote and Numbers) sold by Apple for US$79 in the United States (£55 GBP in United Kingdom). Pages 1.0 was announced at the beginning of 2005 and started selling in February 2005. Pages 3 was announced on August 7, 2007 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard only.

History

Pages on Mac OS X is the successor of Apple's multipurpose office suite AppleWorks. The first rumors of a new Apple word processor to replace AppleWorks circulated the Internet through Mac rumor websites in 2003, suggesting a new software package to be released by Apple called "iWorks" or "iWork". Many Mac users were expecting the new program (which rumor sites then claimed would be called "Documents") in 2004. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO finally announced iWork '05 along with iLife '05 at the beginning of 2005.

iWork '08 began shipping in 2007 which includs Pages '08, Keynote '08, and Numbers '08 (Apple's spreadsheet application).

There was a program of the same name made for NeXT computers by Pages Software, Inc., including similar WYSIWYG page layout features as Pages for Mac OS X. Since Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, this has led to suggestions that these programs are based on the same codebase. However, since Pages Software's NeXTSTEP assets seem to have been acquired by a Chicago-based IT solutions company, this speculation appears to be unfounded. It is known that Pages for Mac OS X was developed by the same team that developed Keynote 2, a presentation program included in iWork.

Features

Pages includes support for multi-column layouts, paragraph and character styles, footnotes, and Mac OS X built in typographic capabilities. The program can create lists, URL links, page breaks, and will accept data from iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto. Pages contains templates for newsletters, invoices, essays, stationery, invitations, educational materials and other types of documents.

AppleWorks word processing documents and Microsoft Word documents (including Word 2007's Office Open XML format ^[1]) can be imported, and files can be exported to RTF, PDF and Microsoft Word .doc formats.

Pages and Word

Pages is most often compared with Microsoft Word 2004 for Macintosh. ^{[2] [3]} The following are features present in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X but absent in Pages 3.0:

• Autosave (which can be used to recover unsaved documents in case of a crash)
• Visual Basic macros
• Comparison of two documents
• Multiple document versions (Pages has one version of each document)
• Organization Charts
• Linked and Embedded Objects
• US Barcode printing
• Master documents
• Grammar Checks for several languages
• Vertical Script and Japanese furigana
• WordArt
• Drop Caps
• Intelligent caps formatting (like Title Case).
• Native "Save" of RTF and Word format (Pages "exports" to RTF and Word format, but subsequent changes have to be exported again through a number of dialogue steps.)
• Native "Save" to HTML format (Pages 2.0 "exports" to HTML. Pages 3.0 has no HTML export at all.)
• Editing of HTML
• Split document window
• Multiple document windows for the same file
• Italics and bold in fonts with no built in typeface for it.
• Hidden text
• Footnotes, bookmarks, and comments in tables
• Different page orientations within the same document
• Save and open RTF files with pictures (Pages opens and saves RTFDs which may contain images, but does not handle pictures embedded in RTF.)
• Paste Special - for pasting a chart as an image

Pages has the following features that Microsoft Word 2004 lacks:

• Open Word 2007 files (Word 2004 requires that Word 2007 documents be converted to the older 2004 format, while Pages is able to natively read them)
• Save and open Pages documents
• Save and open RTFD files
• Support for Mac OS X Services
• Image Masks
• Extracting part of an image from its background
• Image Levels
• Embedding PDF and EPS images without degradation through rasterizing
• Snap images to Alignment guides
• Text fit/wrap along a curved border
• Copy/paste text formatting
• Instant font size scaling
• Customizable text shadows
• Multi-language dictionary (Word has several language dictionaries, but for each part of the text, one has to decide which language it shall be checked against.)
• Formatting previews (Apart from the Formatting Palette, the dialogues in Microsoft Word do not show previews of formatting changes until they are applied.)
• Ligature control
• Advanced typography features (glyph variants, ornaments, etc.)

Neither Pages 3.0 nor Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X has fully working support for right to left scripts like Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. Neither product supports the OpenDocument format.

Other functions that exist in both products are often implemented in very different ways when it comes to ease of use.

Version history

See also

• List of word processors
• Comparison of word processors
• Microsoft Word
• AppleWorks
• Desktop publishing

References

1. ^ Apple Inc. compatibility page for iWork '08.
2. ^ Apple's Discussion forum for Pages '06.
3. ^ Apple's Discussion forum for Pages '08.

External links

• PagesUser.com Blog dedicated to Pages
• iWork Community
• iWorkAbuser Forums and Downloads.
• Pages FAQ Unofficial FAQ based mostly on content from Apple's support forums.